News About Carbon 60 07-OCT-08 en-us Bloomington, Ind. (UPI) May 5, 2008 - A U.S.-led team of scientists says the asteroid impact thought to have killed the dinosaurs hit with such force that carbon deep in the Earth's crust liquefied.]]> Baltimore MD (SPX) Feb 05, 2008 - Northrop Grumman and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have created the first fully-functional, all-carbon nanotube transistor radio, demonstrating that carbon nanotubes can be used as high-speed transistors, while consuming only one-thousandth the power required by current transistor technology.]]> Albuquerque NM (SPX) Nov 27, 2007 - Almost everyone in the scientific community has heard of buckyballs, but no one until Sandia's Jianyu Huang has seen one being born. Buckyballs - more formally known as buckminsterfullerene C-60 - are carbon-linked nanostructures named for their resemblance to the geodesic dome macrostructures favored for their strength by environmentalist Buckminster Fuller.]]> Atlanta GA (SPX) Nov 27, 2007 - Using room-temperature processing, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have fabricated high-performance field effect transistors with thin films of Carbon 60, also known as fullerene. The ability to produce devices with such performance with an organic semiconductor represents another milestone toward practical applications for large area, low-cost electronic circuits on flexible organic substrates.]]> Bologna, Italy (SPX) Oct 17, 2007 - C60 molecules have an intriguing ball-shaped structure that suggests several interesting possibilities for motion on surfaces. Indeed, researchers have found that the passage of electrons through a bucky ball in a transistor is correlated to the spinning of the ball around its center of mass. Moreover, since bucky balls look like molecular ball bearings, it has been thought that they may be useful as lubricants for use in automobile brakes.]]> Troy NY (SPX) Jun 11, 2007 - Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a new method of compacting carbon nanotubes into dense bundles. These tightly packed bundles are efficient conductors and could one day replace copper as the primary interconnects used on computer chips and even hasten the transition to next-generation 3-D stacked chips.]]> Berkeley CA (SPX) May 10, 2007 - Combining diamond anvils and powerful lasers, laboratory researchers have developed a technique that should be able to squeeze materials to pressures 100 to 1,000 times greater than possible today, reproducing conditions expected in the cores of supergiant planets. Until now, these pressures have only been available experimentally next to underground nuclear explosions.]]> Providence RI (SPX) May 03, 2007 - Freeze-dried ice cream looks like the original product, and even tastes pretty good, but "drying" ice cream at room temperature would leave a sour-smelling, sloppy mess. Similarly, diamonds ejected from deep in the Earth can survive the journey intact only if they head toward the surface quickly and under just the right conditions.]]> Houston TX (SPX) Apr 24, 2007 - A new study by Rice University scientists predicts the existence and stability of another "buckyball" consisting entirely of boron atoms. The research, which has been published online and is due to appear as an editor's selection in Physical Review Letters, was conducted bv Boris Yakobson, professor of mechanical engineering and materials science and of chemistry, and his associates Nevill Gonzalez Szwacki and Arta Sadrzadeh.]]> Berlin, Germany (SPX) Feb 09, 2007 - Since their discovery in the early 1990s, carbon nanotubes and carbon nanofibers-tiny structures made of pure carbon-have been used in a wide variety of applications. They have become indispensable in the nanosciences and nanotechnology. However, because their production on an industrial scale remains expensive, their commercial use in such areas as catalysis has remained unthinkable.]]> Upton NY (SPX) Jan 15, 2007 - If indeed "a diamond is forever," the most primitive origins of Earth's so-called black diamonds were in deep, universal time, geologists have discovered. Black diamonds came from none other than interstellar space. In a paper published online on December 20, 2006, in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters, scientists Jozsef Garai and Stephen Haggerty of Florida International University, along with Case Western Reserve University researchers Sandeep Rekhi and Mark Chance, claim an extraterrestrial origin for the unique black diamonds, also called carbonado diamonds.]]> Seattle WA (SPX) Nov 27, 2006 - A particularly resilient type of carbon from the first plants to regrow after the last ice age - and that same type of carbon from all the plants since - appears to have been accumulating for 11,000 years in the forests of British Columbia, Canada. It's as if the carbon, which comes from the waxy material plants generate to protect their foliage from sun and weather, has been going into a bank account where only deposits are being made and virtually no withdrawals.]]> Richland WA (SPX) May 17, 2006 - Scientists have uncovered a class of gold atom clusters that are the first known metallic hollow equivalents of the famous hollow carbon fullerenes known as buckyballs. The evidence for what their discoverers call "hollow golden cages" appeared today in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.]]> ]]>